10. Whoa! If, historically, many Corporations have shown behaviors similar to those of Psychopaths, is there any hope for a kinder, gentler Capitalism in the future?

From Wikipedia: The Corporation is a 2003 Canadian documentary film written by University of British Columbia law professor Joel Bakan, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The documentary examines the modern-day corporation.

The Corporation attempts to compare the way corporations are systematically compelled to behave with what it claims are the DSM-IV '​s symptoms of psychopathy, e.g.,

• the callous disregard for the feelings of other people,
• the incapacity to maintain human relationships,
• the reckless disregard for the safety of others,
• the deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit),
• the incapacity to experience guilt,
• and the failure to conform to social norms and respect the law. 

However, the DSM has never included a psychopathy diagnosis, rather the DSM-IV proposes antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). ASPD and psychopathy, while sharing some diagnostic criteria, are not synonymous.

The film was nominated for over 26 international awards.[citation needed] It won the World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, 2004, along with a Special Jury Award at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2003[citation needed] and 2004.

Film critics gave the film generally favorable reviews. The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 91% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 104 reviews.[3] Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 73 out of 100, based on 28 reviews.[4]

In Variety (October 1, 2003), Dennis Harvey praised the film's "surprisingly cogent, entertaining, even rabble-rousing indictment of perhaps the most influential institutional model for our era" and its avoidance of "a sense of excessively partisan rhetoric" by deploying a wide range of interviewees and "a bold organizational scheme that lets focus jump around in interconnective, humorous, hit-and-run fashion."[5]

In the Chicago Sun-Times (July 16, 2004), Roger Ebert described the film as "an impassioned polemic, filled with information sure to break up any dinner-table conversation," but felt that "at 145 minutes, it overstays its welcome. The wise documentarian should treat film stock as a non-renewable commodity."[6]

The Economist review, while calling the film "a surprisingly rational and coherent attack on capitalism's most important institution" and "a thought-provoking account of the firm", calls it incomplete. It suggests that the idea for an organization as a psychopathic entity originated with Max Weber, in regards to government bureaucracy. The reviewer remarks that the film weighs heavily in favor of public ownership as a solution to the evils depicted, while failing to acknowledge the magnitude of evils committed by governments in the name of public ownership, such as those of the Communist Party in the former Soviet Union[7] or by monarchies and the Church. The Maoist Internationalist Movement, in their review criticizes the film for the opposite: for depicting the communist party in an unfavourable light, while adopting an anarchist approach favoring direct democracy and worker's councils without emphasizing the need for a centralized bureaucracy.[8]

An op-ed in the Canadian magazine Western Standard reported that the film was "pummeled by experts for getting basic economic facts wrong."[9]

An interview clip with psychiatrist Robert D. Hare appears for several minutes in The Corporation. A pioneer in psychopathy research whose Hare Psychopathy Checklist is used in part to "diagnose" purportedly psychopathic behavior of corporations in the documentary, Hare has since objected to the manner in which his work was presented in the film and the use of his work to bolster what he describes as the film's questionable thesis and conclusions. In Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work (2007; co-written with Paul Babiak), Hare wrote that despite claims by the filmmakers to him during production that they were using psychopathy metaphorically to describe "the most egregious" corporate misbehavior, the finished documentary obviously intends to imply that corporations in general or by definition are psychopathic, a claim that Hare emphatically rejects:

To refer to the corporation as psychopathic because of the behaviors of a carefully selected group of companies is like using the traits and behaviors of the most serious high-risk criminals to conclude that the criminal (that is, all criminals) is a psychopath. If [common diagnostic criteria] were applied to a random set of corporations, some might apply for the diagnosis of psychopathy, but most would not.[10]

However, in his monologue in The Corporation and the transcript with added comments, Hare, in addition to pointing out differences between corporations, clearly uses generalized terms such as "tend", "most", "almost", "routinely", "much the same", "almost by their very nature", and "by definition" with regard to numerous of his characterizations of psychopathy applying to corporations.[11] Nonetheless, Hare insists that his guarded, qualified comments on the "academic exercise" of diagnosing certain corporations as psychopathic was used in support of a larger thesis that he was not informed in advance about and with which he did not agree.